The Story of Comdex

us courtesy of a little listener mail. This message is from Alex, and Alex said, I really enjoy listening to your episodes on c e S and also listening to the shows that you broadcast every year from CS and it got me to thinking about two decades ago, there was a popular trade show called Calm Dex, which is not around anymore. I've always wondered what happened to Comdex and why it failed as a trade show. I know

that some famous things happened at Colm Deck. The blue screen of death coming up on Bill Gates during a Windows demonstration comes to mind. Thanks for making such a great show. Well, thank you Alex for those kind words and for the suggestion. Guys, remember you can always write me to make suggestions for show topics or guests. I should have on the show, or even if you just want to say hi. The email address you can use

is tech stuff at house stuffworks dot com. I'll mention that again at the end of the show, but I know some of you tune out before I get to that, So that's what you can use as an email if you want to get in touch with me. Now, let's talk about Condex and its impact on the text industry. I can't just jump right onto Condex though, I actually have to go back a little bit, and and I also have to admit this was a surprisingly challenging topic.

There's not a whole lot written about Condex as a whole, apart from some articles in computer industry magazines from the time that usually focused on either an upcoming show, like you know, you might read an article in a magazine from seven about Condex eighty seven being around the corner, or you might see an article that is talking about

just a show that just ended. Kind of similar to how people cover c e s right, there will be an article that says, oh, hey, CS is over here, what the big trends were, But you don't really find a whole lot of stuff about the life and death of the show as a whole. You have to find bits and pieces and then end up putting it all together and forming it into a meaningful narrative. So this episode is really the result of hours of research. I

had to piece everything together myself. So typically for every hour of podcasts that I produce, it takes about eight hours of research. That's typical. This one was way more than that. It had to be at least twenty hours of research, maybe more in order to get all of this.

But that's enough stalling. Let's talk about condex. Uh. So, back in nineteen seventy, which is, by the way, many years before Condex actually officially began, there was a group of entrepreneurs based out of Needham, Massachusetts, and they included Robert Bob Lively and Milton Burns, and they created a magazine covering the world of computers and data communications. And the name of that publication was the Data com User, and data com was one word and two ms at

the end of calm. Uh This was before the era of the personal computer. It was even before the era that you would be able to purchase a kit and make your own personal computer. This was the era of many computers and micro computers that were only meant for business or research purposes, so you didn't really see them

in the home. But they were able to create a successful magazine, and two years after they launched it, the publishers partnered with a a different person of future casino magnate Sheldon Gary Addlson to launch a new trade show that they were calling the Interface Conference and Exposition. Now Edelson is or Addlson is an interesting person, someone of great influence both in Las Vegas and in politics. He would eventually go on to build one of the premium

casinos on the Strip, the Venetian. Anyway, after several successful years of running the Interface Conference and Exposition, the group saw another opportunity. So it's nineteen seventy nine. The computer industry was starting to gain some traction, with the home PC market mostly stuck in the world of hobbyists and early adopters. By seventy nine, it was starting to slowly emerge from that market, but it wasn't yet to the point where computers were becoming household objects. Uh. It was

fairly rare to run into homes that had one. They were expensive, and there just weren't a whole lot out there. You're talking about early Apple computers. You're talking about the Commodore sixty four, the Tandy, that kind of stuff. More companies, though, we're really looking into incorporating computers into the workplace. So the Interface Group organized a new event, and this was called the Computer Dealers Exhibition, which was later shortened to

the name Comdex. Now, that nineteen show was modest by later standards, and modest is kind of overstating it. It was tiny compared to the show when it reached its peak. It took place in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, and that was the MGM Grand at the time. The MGM Grand of today is not the same building as the one from nineteen two, totally different places. Approximately four thousand people attended the show, with about a hundred fifty

seven exhibitors present. Now, in those days only industry representatives could attend, so you had to be inside the computer industry in order to uh to be considered for attendance, so general public was not allowed to go into the show. It's very similar to the way C E S is run,

and for many years E three ran that way. Although E three seen which is you know, we're I'm recording this in seventeen is the first time in several years that the show is going to be open to the general public um, assuming that you were able to get a badge in time. I'm gonna be at E three

this year, so that will be interesting. I can't wait to see how it's different from the years past that I have attended when it was industry only anyway, context when it started only allowed industry members and and it really didn't look at any of the personal computer stuff at all because it end that was such a young market. It was really looking at the business applications for computers. So if you visit Las Vegas and you go to the MGM Grand, like I said, that's not the same

casino as the one that hosted the first Condex. If you want to visit the building where the first Condex took place, you actually have to go to Bally's because that's what the old MGM Grand turned into. So I'll walk through Bally's. Casino is also a walk through computer history in a way, and they really did focus on many computers which were named Many, but we're honestly pretty huge machines to to be fair, the original computers that

came out. Those were the ones that took up like an entire room or sometimes the floor of a building like. They were huge, huge machines. Those first computers, the ones that date all the way back to like the forties and fifties, But the many computers of the seventies were still pretty massive machines. And again they were meant for corporate use or manufacturing or things like that. They weren't meant to be on your table at home. Um so

their industrial computers. Almost all the interactions at CONDEX were all about business to business, with computer manufacturers courting big corporations like insurance companies and law firms. So really, if you might represent, say a computer manufacturer, and what you're trying to do is get that representative from that big insurance company to come see your stuff and say, yeah, you know what, I'm going to put in an order for X number of machines for us to use at

our corporate office. That was kind of the purpose for CONDEX. Uh So it wasn't the sort of convention that the average computer junkie would even want to attend that first COMDEX. If you're a big computer nerd, you probably still would not be too keen on that first Condex because it just it was geared towards a different type of person.

It's more for business now. Exhibitors also attended shows like Condex for another reason, not just to connect with potential customers, They also wanted to see what the competition was up to. Keep in mind, these trade shows allowed companies to show off stuff that was in development, stuff that had not

yet hit the market. That meant that if you were a competitor, you might get a look at someone's products before they actually hit store shelves, and if you are able, you might be able to suss out how those products are working and figure out your own version of that same product. It's not quite the same thing as copying someone else. It might involve some reverse engineering a little ethically questionable, but it's certainly was something that happened all

the time. If a competitor's computers incorporated a new feature that you saw customers were really finding to be compelling, you might go back to your team and say, hey, competitor X has this new peripheral and people are going gaga over it. We've got to create something equal to or better than that for our products. So it's really just a fuel for competition. And just like ce S gives rise to certain trends each year, so did CONDEX.

So another reason why companies would attend is to see what trends are starting to come up and should there be uh, some that that the company needs to get involved in, they could end up dedicating some resources to it and then become a player in that space. The worst thing in the world would be to be left behind and become obsolete and see your company's business failed because you weren't able to capitalize on an emerging trend.

So some companies would send people out there just to see, all right, well what's big this year and what do we need to pay attention to? So it really was all about business now. The event was was a success, and the group planned a second event for nineteen eighty and this one took place in the Las Vegas Convention Center. It had outgrown the MGM Grand, but a few attendees

were staying at the MGM Grand. That's you know, just that was the place where they had booked a room, uh, but the show had already outgrown the conference rooms there. The new venue boasted twenty five thousand square feet of exhibition space and more than seven thousand people attended the show, so they nearly doubled in size. Now, that was the first year for the show to use Comdex as a name, and it was also a tragic year. Uh, something really

disastrous happened that year. On the very last day of the Comdex conference, a fire broke out in the MGM Grand overnight and it was a serious fire, and more than eighty people died, most of them from smoke inhalation because the smoke went up into the rooms and a lot of people were asleep and they never woke up. Out of those eight people, eight of them were attending Comdex, and the tragedy marks the worst disaster in Nevada history

and the third worst hotel fire in US history. The cause of the fire was ultimately traced to an electrical ground fault in a wall socket. They had a nearby cooling unit for a pastry display case that had a pair of copper pipes that were exposed that the insulation

had worn down. The copper pipes had been vibrating at times, and that vibration had caused the pipes to rub together and the insulation protecting the pipes worn away, which meant that they could rub against each other, and this eventually caused the short, the electrical short, which then caused a fire. The fire spread very quickly and it was a huge story both in Las Vegas and in the computer industry. Now, despite this tragedy, the conference continued and grew. UH I

was on that last day of the conference. The following year it was even bigger. You would actually see Condex expanded two shows in that year. So in the springtime they the organization launched a Comdex show in New York. The fall show stayed in Las Vegas. So they were splitting up uh to two shows a year, with one on the East Coast and one in Las Vegas. UH. The New York show was a big success. Um. It was more than twice as big as the first Condex

show in Vegas. Had eleven thousand attendees and two thirty seven exhibitors. That Vegas show happened in the fall, and this was huge business, not just for the exhibitors and the attending professionals, but also for the organizers themselves. They

were making a huge amount of profit. At its peak, Condex could command fifty nine dollars per square foot of exhibit space, and when it was the biggest trade show around, there was more than one point three million square feet available, and CONDEX staffers were really really pushing for companies to end up leasing that space, so they were making buckos of dollars serious cash just so they a company can

rent some carpeted floor. Um. Yeah, if you want to read some vitriol about CONDEX, just do some searches about how much money the organizers were making back in these days, and and how a lot of the exhibitors felt that they were being almost like extorted in order to rent larger and larger spaces year over year, like they were being pressured by staffers who were acting like sale osman

to rent more space each successful year. Um. It's one of the reasons why some companies said that they ultimately abandoned the show. Well, back in the show was still growing just as the computer industry was growing and holding two shows ended up working out with the Spring Show in New York and the Fall Show in Las Vegas. So in nineteen eight two they expanded again and this

time there were three shows. The Spring event occurred in Atlantic City, aka the Las Vegas of the East Coast, and the Fall show happened in Las Vegas, but there was a third show that happened in Europe and it took place in Amsterdam. That marked the beginning of Condex expanding beyond the United States. Now that trend would continue and snowball over the following years. So you start looking at the number of shows Condex was holding year over year,

and it kept on increasing. In two thousand two, there were eighteen comdat shows scheduled throughout that year, eighteen different events across the globe in two thousand two. Now, one of those, the one that was scheduled for Mexico City, ended up getting canceled, but that still means there were seventeen shows in two thousand two. I mean that's think about how how many resources you would have to dedicate

to hold those that many events around the world. Alright, but back to the nineteen eighties, So after those first few years when everyone was concentrating on many computers and business to business type stuff, personal computers began to play a role in shows because they were starting to take off. People were starting to purchase personal computers at a larger rate. It was going beyond the hobbyists and beyond the early adopter,

and so it became part of comdex history. He started seeing computers like the Apple to e and the first IBM compatible computers. First you saw the IBM computers, and then wordly after that you saw the IBM clones that we're making their way to market. And you also had other computers like the Commodore sixty four, the Tandy computer, and the Amiga line of computers which originally came from

Commodore as well. And one of these days I'm gonna have to do a full show about Tandy, I think, because it's hard to believe that a company that started off as a leather goods company got into the personal computer business. And for that matter, I should probably talk about IBM compatibles and clones too, as that was a big, big deal early on in the personal computer age and one of the reasons why IBM got out of the

consumer computer market entirely for many years. But the important thing, uh, the important thing to remember in this part of the Condex story is that these companies were becoming important enough to warrant a spot on the show floor. By Condex started holding a show in Atlanta as the city where I am in. I'm from Atlanta, Georgia, So I remember

Condex talked about. I was a kid in the eighties, and um, I never attended a Condex, but I remember people talking about them, and the show in Atlanta would continue yearly until nineteen and at that point, Comdex began to alternate between Atlanta and Chicago every year. So I probably would have been pretty bored if I had gone

to one of the comdex is in Atlanta. I mean, these shows were huge, and there were lots of booths and everything, but again it was mostly about like productivity machines and software, and not really the kind of stuff I was interested in, which was namely computer games. He didn't really see a whole lot of that Condex because

that's just not what the focus of the show was about. Also, in nineteen three, I Love This Bill Gates gave his first speech at a Comdex in nineteen eighty three, and that would become a regular event over future shows, and Gates would end up getting larger audiences every year. He

would command a bigger room every year. Obviously became a much more important event in future comdex is, but back in three it was rather modest in comparison, so much so that the projectionist for Bill Gates's presentation was his own father. I just think that's kind of a charming little bit of information. Well, I've got more to say about what happened to comdex in the nineteen eighties, but before I get into that, let's take a quick break

to thank our sponsor. All Right, So, a couple of big events happened in the early nineteen eighties that rippled through comdex. For one thing, the Macintosh debuted in nine four, and that's when the graphics user interface or Gooey, became big in home personal computers. The wind the Windows system Microsoft Windows also made a big splash around that same time, and Microsoft and Apple had worked together developing a Gooey. It wasn't exactly you might hear stories about, oh well,

Windows was just copying the mac os. It's not entirely true. Actually, the two companies were working together to develop Gooey's And to be fair, the graphic user interface wasn't developed out of Apple or Microsoft. The graphic user interface originated as a project out of Xerox Park but that's another story for another time. The graphics user interface, however, was changing computers because it was seen as a much more intuitive,

easy to understand system than command line systems. So in the old days, if you want to run a program on your computer, you had to type in run in the program name, and then the computer would know to execute that command and start that program. You might have some programs that had an auto startup based upon the disk that you were using, and that would make things a little more smooth. But until the graphics user interface came along, you couldn't just click on an icon and

have have something start. You actually had to type stuff in, and it wasn't exactly user friendly for people who weren't already interested in computers, so it was sort of a barrier to entry. The graphic user interface lowered that barrier, and that's really when we started seeing personal computers take off, not just for homes but in schools and all sorts

of places. So the Macintosh and the Windows system were really important, and they dominated the show floor by everyone was talking about Windows based systems and graphic user interfaces. And it's funny because if you look back on these early condex shows, you can see the debut of stuff that we all take for granted now, stuff that you know well of course that exists. Sometimes we're looking at debuts from the stuff that's completely obsolete at this point.

So if you are able to find videos from that era and you watch them, it's almost comical to see them debut because it's ancient history now in the in the computer world, one of the resources I used when researching this show was an episode of The Computer Chronicles from so At the beginning of that episode, the CEO of Digital Research talked about how applications had suddenly become important.

So he was referring to programs like desktop publishing software or spreadsheet management programs, things like that, and that they were taking center stage because they were taking advantage of this graphic user interface. It's really similar in a way to how smartphone apps have become a major focus in the tech industry today. The hardware still important, but a lot more intention is going towards the software running on

top of the hardware. Well. Comdex was also where companies could show off new products like laser printers, which in the ease were super super new and exciting, or computer peripher roles or computer systems and software packages. And because the industry was heating up, the show just kept getting larger and more grandiose every year. And it wasn't long before companies began employing young women to entice people into booths.

And I saw one journalist's account of an early nineteen eighties condex that dismissively referred to these women as demo dollies. Now at c S you tend to hear these women being referred to as booth babes, and I just like to take a moment to address this because it bugs me. So as I get older, I get more uncomfortable with these terms, and that's because they ignore the fact that these women are human beings. Many of them may be

hired because of their appearance. You know. It might be that they have a modeling agency and a company hires them because of their profile and the modeling agency, and so it's completely based on their appearance. But it doesn't change the fact that we're talking about actual people here.

I'm not a fan of companies using sex appeal to get people to pay attention to their stuff, particularly if we're talking about products that have nothing to do with being sexy in the first place, but the women and men too, because we see male models also being pulled in for this duty, especially for things like um, wearables and sports uh type of technology. At places like CS we see both women and men who are you know, chiseled from marble showing these off. But that makes sense.

You understand, right all right, that this person is fit and the product is promising to help you get fit, So you see the connection there. It's a little more tough if you're like, this is a case for a smartphone and this woman wearing barely anything is holding the case, it's a little harder to justify. Uh. I don't hold it against the models. They're doing a job. They were hired to do a job, and that's what they're doing.

And I also realized that my opinions are just my own and that I'm probably being a bit too old fashioned. But my main point is just to remember these are people, not just a walking, talking display. So I hate terms like booth babes or demo dollies, which I think is even somehow worse than booth babes um because it is so dismissive. It's it's treating a person like an object. It truly is objectification and I don't care for that. So old man lecture is over. But seriously, demo dollies

come on anyway. By the mid nighties, companies creating IBM compatible machines had pretty much run IBM out of the consumer PC business. The clones of IBM s machines were perfectly legal as long as the company's making them could demonstrate that they didn't steal IBMS approach but rather reverse engineered it, which seems like a pretty fine detail, but it's one that made the production of IBM clones completely legal. More on that if I ever do a full episode

about IBM compatible computers now. Watching the Computer Chronicles also reminded me how the industry at that time was dominated by dudes. You know, in the nineteen eighties, if you looked at the show floor for Condex, men outnumbered women by an enormous percentage. Apart from the women who were hired to lure people into booths, you hardly saw any females on the floor at all. But as the industry matured, we saw more women taking roles in the industry, including

leadership roles. But I'm pretty sure those early CONDEX shows saw really long lines at the men's room and like almost completely empty women's restrooms, so and it seeing juxtaposition and other compared to other arenas. The same thing was true of Consumer Electronics Show and in fact, I would

argue it's it's still largely true. We're seeing more and more UH women on the show floor at ce s, both in leadership positions and attendees that kind of thing, but I think it's still far more men than women. But but the early days of CONDEX, it was ridiculous that imbalance. One of the most amusing elements of the Computer Chronicles episode I watched was the segment dedicated to

portable computers. So back in the nineteen eighties this was six Those devices were huge, largely because they had to have five and a quarter inch floppy disk drives because that was the the main media of choice in the mid eighties. The laptops, even the light ones, weighed somewhere around twelve pounds or more, so they were hefty enough that you wouldn't want them on your lap for very long.

You'd also probably chuckle at hearing some of the processor speeds being UH promoted back in those days, here's something like this processor has sixteen mega hurts processor speed, and you know that's probably not gonna impress you very much today, but you know, a different time. Another interesting product that was introduced and featured in that show was from Phillips. It was a data storage system that consisted of twenty

different disks arranged in a case. The discs were in cartridges, and a mechanical arm could go up or down the rack of cartridges and retrieve or insert discs to access the information on them. Now, each disc was twelve inches in diameter, and each disc could hold two whole gigabytes of information on it, which meant that the entire apparatus could hold forty gigabytes. So think about that for a moment.

They're smartphones right now that can more than three times that amount of information, and those will fit in your pocket. So we've really come a long way since the nineteen eighties. The six Condex show also had some of the earliest devices that we would put into the wearable category today.

Puma showed off a gadget that snapped onto their running shoes and it had a microprocessor inside of it that could detect whenever your foot made impact with the ground and it acted as a step counter, So you could use it on a run and you could do your run, and then after you were done running, you would have to go back home and you would have to use a cable to hook the gadget up to your computer and pull the data off of the device so that you could look at it through the software running on

your computer. That would give you a visualization of the data, and then you could see how far you ran and how many calories you burned. It's not quite as easy as connecting everything via Bluetooth, which is typically how it happens today, but it was a hint of what would

follow almost thirty years later. Other emerging technologies that began to pop up at Comdex in the early to mid nineteen eighties included voice recognition, optical discs so CDs, and things like that, three and a half inch floppy disks, and others, and we began to see the interesting seesaw

relationship between hardware and software. So if you read articles from the nineteen eighties about Condex, you'll see journalists point out that these incredibly powerful computers that were hitting the market didn't have any software that took advantage of all that raw power, they'd say like, well, yeah, you can get the super fast machine, but what good is that. I mean, there's no software that really takes advantage of this machine's capabilities. We're never going to see that happened.

I mean, it'll it'll run existing software faster, so if you've got like a huge spreadsheet, it won't take as long re read to load. But other than that, I mean, why would you need all that power? Now, it's kind of funny to think that a three six processor computer from the mid nineteen eighties was thought to be more powerful than anything you would ever need, because a three six computer compared to today's smartphones would see clunk, clunky,

and slow in comparison. Since those days, we've seen a lot more tech journalists agree to what is called Worth's law, which is named after Nicholas Worth, who observed that software speed was decreasing at a rate faster than hardware speed was increasing. So, in other words, software is getting bloated and requires more resources to run faster than we're seeing improvements in those resources. So year over year, it feels

like computers are going slower rather than faster. It's not that the computers are less powerful than they were before. It's that the software requires more power than the previous generations software. And that's because we get bloat software bloat over the course of many versions of the same program.

So take take a word processor program. Well, every successive version of that word processor program is likely to be larger and more resource hungry than the version before, because a company has to start including more and more features to convince you to upgrade, to buy the newest version. Otherwise, you would just buy one version and you'd stick with it until you, you know, until it just literally could not measure up to what you needed it to do.

I mean, why would I need to buy a new word processor program if I've got one that works just fine. So to convince me to buy a new one, companies are going to add more and more features. Well. As software gets more complex, it becomes less efficient and therefore it requires more power to run. And even to this day, there's still a temptation to declare a machine that has a screaming fast processor and cavernous storage capacity is being

more than what you are ever going to need. But the more seasoned computer users among us know that eventually software is going to use up and maybe even exceed that hardware's capabilities. So if you build it, the software will fill it. It's kind of like if you build it, they will come. Now. The show in Vegas in nineteen eight six was just one of seven. The other six shows happened in Tokyo, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Amsterdam, Nice, and Sydney. And the show in nineteen eighty six in Vegas lasted

five days. That was the longest conference up to that point. So things were still on the rise. Everything was still growing every year. More money was being poured into the show, and each show meant that there was more square footage to least two companies, and the organizers were making some

serious bank in those days. Meanwhile, exhibitors were enjoying the benefits of connecting with customers and getting an eye on what the competition was up to, and a lot of ideas were launched at Condex, not all of them successfully. There were plenty of examples of products that never went anywhere, and vaporware became a common word. Vaporware, by the way, is when you announce a product that never actually comes to market, it just remains vapor. It's the kaiser So's

of the technological world. Now some Condex shows also became vaporware. In nineteen seven and in nineteen eighty eight, the planned Condex event in Tokyo was postponed, essentially canceled. It never really happened. The nine event for Paris was canceled out right Now, things were not dire, not by a long shot, but there were some growing pains as the organizers kept trying to increase the show's reach. Sometimes they did it faster than they could actually support, and typically the reason

these shows would get canceled is because they weren't. The show organizers weren't able to sell out enough space on the show floor to justify holding the trade show. So they couldn't get enough vendors to agree to come to a show, they'd postponed it or cancel it rather than lose money on throwing a show with a small number

of exhibitors. By the late nineteen eighties, Condex was looking to grow some more, so it changed its attendance policy and started to sell it admission to the general public, so for the first time, people unaffiliated with the industry or people who were not in the media could actually come to the show and no big surprise here. Attendance numbers exploded as a result. Now, this was not necessarily

welcomed by all the other attendees. Some people were complaining that it was becoming too difficult to navigate the floor because it was just there were just too many people. There're too many bodies in the way. And other people were worried that the show would turn into an enormous marketplace with the general public purchasing products directly from manufacturers rather than retailers. You know, like, why bother packing this device back up and shipping it back to your headquarters.

I'll just buy it off of you right here, even though it's not scheduled to launch for another three months. You also heard a lot of people say the show was starting to lose its focus. It was it was starting to incorporate too many things outside of the core computer and computer peripheral industry, and as a result, there were a lot of people worried that the show was starting to spiral out of control. Now, the early nine nineties saw the rise of a new, very important player

in the computer space, and that is the Internet. While the mainstream public was still getting a handle on what the Internet was back In the early es, Condex began to feature more exhibitors, promising the information super Highway would change everything, and in many ways they were right, though not all of their predictions would turn out to be accurate. For one thing, in the early nine nineties, no one really had an idea of how the Internet could become

a massive tool for commerce. It was more like a point of contact for people. So companies might have a website, but it was meant to give information about a company, or to allow a potential customer or an existing customer to contact the company. But there wasn't a whole lot beyond that in those early days, especially since you know, the Worldwide Web didn't really debut until so before that.

You're just talking about stuff like email and some other functions that were mainly used in the academic world, and we're just barely getting a foothold in the corporate and then public world. Now. Over the next several years, more exhibitors would show off systems designed to make accessing the Internet more intuitive and seamless, all the way from operating

systems to web browsers. In early news broke that a suitor to Comdex would be taking over the show, and that suitor was a Japanese software company called soft Bank. The company made an eight hundred million dollar deal with the Interface Group to acquire the trade show. Now in nineteen four, SoftBank had already purchased a publishing, exposition and

conference division from the company Ziff Davis. They had tried to buy Ziff Davis outright, but z if Davis refused and then instead settled on buying this division within Stiff Davis. So as If Davis spins Zala division sells it to SoftBank. This division was an events planning division for publishing expositions. Then SoftBank goes and buys condex from the Interface Group

for eight hundred million dollars. Now, these two purchases made SoftBank the largest name in the trade show game, and it also gave some prestige to the CEO of SoftBank, who is Masa Yoshi's son, who was sometimes called the Bill Gates of Japan, and his story is really interesting too. Son had overcome poverty and also social stigma to become a successful businessman in Japan. He was the son of two Korean immigrants, and in Japan at the time, Koreans

were sometimes the victims of racial prejudice. So his story is pretty interesting. Maybe I'll do an episode about him sometime. At this point, Comdex was enormous. The show in Vegas had almost two hundred thousand people in attendance. That's a huge jump from that four thousand from nineteen seventy nine. Now keep in mind they are also opened up the doors to the general public, so part of that growth was just from people curious to learn more about the

latest computers, but they had no connection to the industry itself. Now, along with the growth in attendance was a growth of complaints among exhibitors. Some companies were protesting what they considered to be unfair fees and rental rates. But even though they felt that perhaps things were becoming a little unfair, most companies also felt that the show was too important to skip. They couldn't skip out on it, or else they would be left behind by their competitors, so they

would show up and they would pay. There had been talks of launching a competitor show, like a bunch of groups saying, you know what, forget this, We're gonna go out and make our own trade show. But they hadn't really gone far beyond just some big talk. Now, in the next section, I'm going to really concentrate on how the show got to its largest point and then what happened to make it disappear over the next few years. But before I get into that, let's take another quick

break to thank our sponsor. All right, So it's Condex hits its peak. It gets the largest it will ever get in. The number of exhibitors was more than two thousand, four hundred and eighty and they were taking up one point three five million square feet of space on the show floor. In the primary Vegas show of the year, the number of attendees was about two hundred forty thousand. I mean a huge number of people, like a quarter

of a million people almost at Condex Las Vegas. This was a monster of a show, but it also marked the beginning of the decline of Condex. Exhibitors were complaining even more about predatory practices of Condex staffers, pressuring companies to invest in larger booths year over year. They were saying, well, we want to be part of the show, but every

year we're making the arrangements. Everyone's pressuring us to make our booth bigger than the year before, which means we have to spend more money in or to be part of this show. And it's getting ridiculous. It got so ridiculous for some companies that began to drop out, including big names. IBM withdrew from Condex because of these practices, and according to a CNN Money report from two thousand three,

Condex became a quote magnet for dumb money end quote. Now, what they meant by that is that if you participated in Condex year over year, that was just a recipe of diminishing returns. You were going to see fewer and fewer benefits of being part of the show, and ultimately it would become a drain on resources, meaning you're losing more money attending the show than you're making out of

business because of the show. So more exhibitors were starting to drop out following they were saying, well, I'm spending money, but I don't see the return on investment. This is like putting a big time commercial out on a channel that no one is watching. What's the point? Now? Behind the scenes, in a series of moves so complicated, I don't even understand them, SoftBank reorganized its divisions and departments So it took the division that owned Condex and that

publishing conference I talked about before. It was essentially known as z d Events at the time, and transformed this into a new entity, a publicly traded entity called Key three Media. That's key the numeral three and media all is one word. And this was a holding company. It was just existed to hold these assets. That's that's all it did. Now soft Bank held about half of the ownership of Key three Media, but eventually it would spin it off completely. Now that happened after SoftBank tried to

auction off the events division. So why was it trying to sell something the company had only purchased a couple of years before. Well, perhaps organizing and running the events was too far outside the wheelhouse of the software corporation. The acquisition of Condex and Ziff Davis's publishing conference didn't necessarily include the people with the knowledge and experience of organizing those events. At any rate, the auction did not

result in any satisfactory authors. Apparently, the largest offer on the table was for six D forty million dollars, which is way less than the eight million SoftBank paid for Condex alone. Never mind the Ziff Davis deal, so Key three Media would eventually become an independent spinoff and the sole owner of Condex now. The head of Key three Media was a guy named Fred Rosen, and Rosen had made a fortune growing and then selling ticket Master. Boo

ticket Master. That's my own personal uh bias coming through. I have an issue with Ticketmaster, many issues with Ticketmaster. I should do an episode about them, but it will be the most unbiased, unforgiving episode of tech stuff ever, So maybe I should just keep my trap shut. Anyway, Rosen reportedly ran Key three as if it were a

massive corporation rather than an events production company. He moved the headquarters to an expensive part of Los Angeles, not too far from his own mansion, and he would end up taking company trips on a private jet across the world. His salary was one and a half million dollars in two thousand one. That's a big salary for a CEO, especially considering most CEOs get the majority of their compensation

and benefits as opposed to a direct salary. A million and a half and two thousand one is no chump change. Former employees said that his managerial style was incredibly confrontational and off putting so much so that he was driving away staffers who had been working in the trade show industry for decades, which meant that as a result, Key three was depleting its company's talent pool. You had fewer and fewer people around who knew how to handle trade shows.

So it was a mess. To put it lightly. Now, this takes us to and this was the year that featured that infamous blue screen of death during a demonstration of an early build of Windows. You heard our listener Alex referred to this earlier. So what happened, well, Bill Gates and Chris capo Sella were on stage during the keynote event to talk about Windows Night, which had not yet launched. It was still in development, it had actually been delayed, and Capsella was trying to show how Windows

ninety eight could download drivers. You know, drivers are these components that are needed so for software and hardware to work with the operating system, and he was explaining how seamless this operation was when the computer crashed and went to the blue screen of death, at which point Bill Gates started uckling and Capacella was like doing a little

bit of a shuffle. He was very quickly trying to switch away from the monitor screen, and it could have been an embarrassing disaster, but I think they actually handled the problem really well with humor. So the audience started laughing, and Capacella, who was responding to the audiences laughter at the blue screen of death, said moving right along in a very self deprecating way, like he wasn't angry. He seemed a little a little chagrined, but not not completely

thrown off. And then Bill Gates said this must be why we're not shipping windows yet, to which Capacella said, absolutely, absolutely. So it was a moment that reminded everyone that sometimes stuff just goes wrong. And I actually like watching this clip. I I was afraid to watch it. I never watched it at the time. And I tend to feel a lot of empathy for people who are giving a public presentation because there are enormous pressures on you when you are giving a live speech in front of a big

crowd of people. Keep in mind, we're talking Condex when the attendance is like two hundred thousand plus people. You could have thousands of people in that audience all focusing on you and something goes wrong. I feel nothing but empathy because I've been in those kind of situations and a much smaller scale and it feels like torture. But I liked watching this clip because it didn't feel awful. It felt like they handled this pretty well as it

feels actually pretty natural. So for one thing, it's not a presentation that fools you into thinking of product is completely flawless. If you've ever been to any product demonstration where it's clear everything has been prerecorded and rehearsed so that nothing goes wrong, it doesn't feel genuine, and you might even feel when you get your hands on the real thing that you were given a misrepresentation of what

it was all about. Seeing something kind of fail and people acknowledge it and move on it was a little refreshing. So it's just a kind of a funny moment, and something that Microsoft presentations frequently had that is funny moments, not failures. And some of those funny moments were intentional, and some of them we're not intentional. Developers Developers, Developers Developers was also the first year to see a major decline in attendance. So I said two hundred thousand, but

actually it was fewer than that. At that point. This was the beginning of the end for Comdex, though at the time no one could see that. It did just appear to be a blip in the growth, and the following year saw another dip, and the number of exhibitors in two thousand or rather was one thousand, nine eleven, so more than two thousand, four hundred. In nine seven and nine eleven, we start seeing fewer exhibitors showing up.

More people are irritated with the way Comdex is running things, or rather the way Key three Media is running things, and are not coming back. Now. There was a little bit of a rally in two thousand a few more exhibitors signed up, mostly new companies, but that was not

to last. Also in Condex, organizers shook things up by changing the requirements for mass media, and a lot of major outlets that had been covering context since the beginning found themselves turned away, and that really shook things up. I mean, you had big, big names and mass media told that they were not going to be allowed to attend Comdex, and that did not help the organization at all. I mean, making sure that you um, you alienate media is a good way to have some pretty negative coverage

about your organization. And in two thousand and two thousand one, there was another problem. This was outside of Condex. This was a huge problem that had global implications, and I'm talking about the dot com bubble burst. So the dot com bubble, that's when you had all these web based companies popping up, getting huge amounts of investment capital, whether it was private investment or the company had gone public very early. The value of the company was inflated beyond

what it could actually do. And then ultimately many of these companies failed to show any real value and the bubble,

this investment bubble burst. Dozens of companies went under, and companies in the computer industry in general suffered, even if they weren't directly tied to dot com, because they were in the computer industry, they were hit pretty hard because there was a ripple effect that came outward from the dot com companies to all the other computer companies that were, you know, kind of in that same pool, even though they weren't necessarily themselves and dot com company. Well, that

meant that that ripple effect continued to hit Condex. And another event also ended up really setting Condex back, and that was the terrorist attack on September eleven, two thousand one in the United States that affected trade shows because it ended up affecting international travel. It's scaled back international travel to to a huge degree in the wake of those attacks, completely understandably. I mean, there's there's there's nothing

else to say about that. But it did affect the trade shows at a time when Condex was already having problems. So the Las Vegas Condex show in two thousand one had a hundred twenty five thousand attendees, and that's still a large number of people, you know, hundred twenty five thousand, but still very short of that two forty thousand the show had at its peak. In two thousand two, Key three Media was in dire straits and not the band.

With three days to go before the Las Vegas Trade Show opened, the company announced in its quarterly earning statement that it might have to or Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection if it could not raise more capital, or sell the company off or find a merger partner. Key three Media's revenue had plummeted in two thousand two, so in two thousand one, the third quarter revenues were at fifty one and a half million. In two thousand two, third quarter

revenues were down to thirty eight point four million. That's a big drop over the course of the full year. The company had lost nearly three hundred million dollars. In two thousand one, it was in the black and it made a profit of fourteen point one million. It's a small profit relatively speaking, but the loss of three hundred million that's a huge, huge downturn. Things were looking pretty awful.

On top of that, the company had an upcoming interest payment on a debt it owed, and no one was really sure if they the company would actually be able to sign the check to pay off that interest payment, which is why they were looking at the possibility of entering Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection. Shares of Key three Media were down to a measly one point four since per share. It's pretty ugly, folks now. In February two thousand three,

the Key three Media filed for Chapter eleven protection. When it finally emerged from Chapter eleven, so they were able to get their act together and come out of Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection. They also rebranded themselves. They were no longer Key three Media. Now they were called Media Live, and there was some hope that this new brand would be able to recapture the glory days of Condexes in the past, but it was not meant to be. The

two thousand three show drew only fifty thousand attendees. Fifty thousand, still a lot of people, but not compared to two In two thousand four, in a move that shocked very few people, Condex Las Vegas was canceled. The struggles of Media Alive were well known. They were pretty public. People

knew that the company was in trouble. Attendance had dropped significantly over the past few years, so many large companies had pulled out the show, expressing their exasperation of dealing with the policies and high pressure sales tactics of the organizers. There were still some hope along Media Live lines that two thousand five would be different than they would be able to come back in two thousand five and two

thousand four would just be a year off. But in two thousand five, all of the company's planned condex events were canceled except for one, so it was supposed to happen in Las Vegas but didn't. The only Condex event to happen in that year was in Greece in Athens, but all the other ones were canceled. Analysts said that the implosion of Condex came about due to a mix of mismanagement, depletion of talent, bad marketing choices, and also

just that exhibitors weren't willing to play ball anymore. So the problem was that they couldn't had enough companies to agree to be part of the show to have a show. It's kind of like throwing a huge party advertised as a star studded event, but the only celebrities who show up are a couple of folks from one of the later seasons of MTVS The real world doesn't really work. You can't really fuel celebrity party that way. No offense to anyone who's ever been on MTVS the real world.

It didn't help that shows like the Consumer Electronics Show, now known just as c e S, had become more popular. Some of the big names that had been regulars at comdex had withdrawn, and now we're attending c e S instead. Comdex would see a bit of a revival, a strange revival in two thousand ten. So it had gone dead between two thousand four and two thousand and ten. But

in two thousand and ten we saw Condex Virtual. So instead of a physical trade show that you would go and attend for drink, thousands of people walking around the convention center, Condex Virtual was a website you would go to and it's simulated a trade show. You could watch keynote speeches, and you could virtually visit vendor booths. And it showed up again in two thousand eleven and one more time in two thousand twelve, and then it faded away.

If you were to go to the Condex Virtual website today, you would get an under construction page, which seems charmingly out of date if you ask me. And that's the story of Condex from its birth to its death. Trade shows still exist. Some of them are as large or larger than Condex was at its height. Others are a bit more modest, and we're seeing some companies like Apple and Google concentrate on holding their own events rather than

abiding by an annual trade show schedule. So instead of saying we're gonna hold off on announcing something until someone else's schedule lines up, they say, no, we'll hold our own events and we don't. That way, we don't get lost in the shuffle. I hope you enjoyed this episode, Thanks again to Alex for suggesting it. If you have a show idea you'd like me to cover, please let me know. You can send me an email at tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me

a line on Twitter or Facebook. The show's handle is tech stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.